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At Least They’re In School…

That’s the positive spin on this:

A YOUNG man whispers a confession: as a university student, hekilled six or seven of his peers. He cannot be sure of the number,since his shots were fired in gun battles. He intimidated professors,burned their cars, and helped kidnap—briefly—their children to forcethem to give good marks to certain students. He did it all as a memberof a campus cult. When he renounced his membership, he got deaththreats and moved to another city, where he lives today.

Nigeria’s university system used to be the finest in west Africa,but today’s classes are overcrowded, buildings are crumbling and thecurriculum has remained unchanged for years. The cults emerged from theshambles. Having started life as confraternities for the most academicstudents, they have deteriorated into gang violence. The Exam EthicsProject, a lobby group, says that inter-cult violence killed 115students and teachers between 1993 and 2003. The real number may bemuch higher.

And:

As their strength grew, the cults’ influence on the universitiesbecame more malign. They exacerbated the corruption that had alreadybred in unmanageably big classes and deteriorating facilities. Today,older students and alumni flood campuses in the first weeks of the newacademic year to recruit for the cults. Omolade Adunbi, ananthropologist, says that some students, fearing that they are going tobe failed in exams, believe the only way to protect themselves is tobelong to a cult where they can “harass professors”.

How did the cults become such a problem? Wole Soyinka, a Nobelprizewinner for literature, helped found the Pyrates Confraternity, thefirst such group, in 1952 at the elite University of Ibadan. Slowly,splinter groups emerged: the Black Axe, the Klansmen Konfraternity, andcountless others. It was harmless fun to begin with. But militaryleaders of the 1980s and 1990s saw the groups’ growing membership as achance to confront the leftist student unions, often aligned withpro-democracy movements. So the confraternities were given money andweapons. They turned against student activists—and against each other.By the mid-1980s, violence had become so fierce that Mr Soyinka triedunsuccessfully to disband his former creation.